XP installation woes

[mystahr]

And still I am twiddling to get my system properly set up.

The short story is that now after another try last night/this morning I am finding myself with THREE!! XP installments (on C/D and E now too).

Anyhow here's the prelude to these woes:

upon the first XP Home installment I made the huge error of going online unprotected catching myself many a virus which made further installation impossible (as Norton was simply failing to let itself install). So I did a new install this time on the D-disk which was succesfull and clean (and is from where I can safely get on the net).
I figured this can't be right though to have my boot on the D since quite a few programs work from the C-disk.

So last night I tried updating; no change. And this morning I figured I'd try a new installment (which I find after installing this has now moved to the E-disk )

It's rather driving me bananas now, as all I wanted to really do was start with a clean disk (everything is backed-up) but for now it seems all I am doing is getting myself in deeper shit. Why did they ever take that fdisk option out of XP

[Rune]

In the XP install program, you must delete all partitions prior to installing. It's almost like fdisk. I don't remember exactly which step you can do this, but if you read every options/choices you get it should be pretty clear.

And XP can function on another drive than C:. I had it on E for a long time with no problems.

[mystahr]

After performing some new found windows updates, I found myself with a super screwed system without abiliy to get even online. Only system-recovery helped save my ass

Errrrrrrrr......

Thanks Rune, I will succeed at one point

[cimoc]

Last Wednesday I went to sleep without problems (computer related, that is). Thursday, when I awoke, my pc would not start
I went to the witch-doctor, who diagnosed that everything was ok, except for burnt processor, motherboard and graphics card.
So I bought new stuff, and, since I changed the motherboard, I had to reinstall XP all over.

Now, I have XP pro, but I think the same goes for XP home as well.

So, to start with, the programs that you have installed with the XP-on-C installation will work only if you boot from C. SAme for the other installations. At least this is what happened to me. So, if you want to keep the XP-on-D installation, you must boot from D and reinstall everything you wish to keep (you don't have to install them on D, just run the XP-on-D, so the corresponding registry is updated.

First go into your BIOS and activate booting from cd. Start a new installation. The good news is that you have an option to choose a) the drive and b) whether to format this drive or leave in as it is (leave files intact or something, it said). This is what I chose. I installed on D, then reinstalled my basic applications (Cubase SX, and stuff like Acrobat, backup program etc), then copied the VST plugins folder from C to D (I have a BIG vst plugins folder), and only had to open each (commercial) vst plugin and reenter the authorization code. Of course for stuff like Sampletank and NI plugins that generate a windows-related digital ID, you have to go online and ask for a new code, but I managed to finish all this in one day.

Now I still have to clean up c-drive, see what is to keep, install it properly on d, and then format (which I think I can do from XP-on-D, not sure, though, I seem to remember one time when I tried to format a drive with an installation of Windows Me and Xp would not let me. So I got a floppy for a Win98 boot and run fdisk from DOS. Voila!

Look at this as a good opporunity to get rid of junk on your drive. Just be sure you have everything backed up (especially authorization keys, installers and updates) before erasing things!

Good luck!!!

PS to clear it up, it does not matter on which drive you install windows and applications, they can be anywhere on your pc, BUT what matters is that you install applications into the windows version that you boot up. If you boot from c, install Cubase and then boot from d, if you try to open Cubase you get an error. Does this sentence make sense?